1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to communication systems, and more particularly to electronic message delivery.
2. Description of the Related Art
Receiving unwanted electronic messages, such as e-mail messages, wastes time and valuable resources. Electronic message communication has become a prevalent, and perhaps preferred, method of communication in today's world. Such communication is apparent in most aspects of daily life including workplace, home, and travel. At the workplace, the messages may arrive from clients, partners, customers, or other employees. Additionally, unwanted messages commonly known as “SPAM” are received by users. The circumstances are similar for the home user where both wanted and unwanted SPAM messages are received. Reviewing the SPAM messages consumes time, which may be highly valuable in the case of workplace time, and may also undermine the user's capacity to receive other, desirable, messages. In addition, when the flow of unwanted messages is large, it also impact the computer infrastructure (bandwidth, storage, CPU). Additionally, the email infrastructure has become a very common way to spread viruses and the trend has been that some of the most recent viruses spread very rapidly and there is often a window of time of several hours during which anti-virus products are not capable of detecting a new virus yet. Accordingly, there is a need for a method for controlling and reducing the number of harmful data, such as SPAM messages or virus-carrying messages, received by users associated with a store and forward protocol relay.